Behind Reactor Battle, a Legion of Grunts

A Tokyo Electric Power employee reads an instrument in a control room, lit only by flashlights, at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex.
Landov

By

Phred Dvorak

Updated March 24, 2011 12:01 a.m. ET

The glory, such as it is, for battling blazes and radiation leaks at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex has belonged to firefighters, soldiers and a corps of plant workers dubbed the Fukushima 50.

But much of the grinding grunt work of taming Japan's worst nuclear accident has fallen to a less-visible group—hundreds of industry foot soldiers who support the effort by carrying pipes, clearing debris and performing other manual labor amid the threat of elevated radiation.

In normal times, thousands of workers perform routine tasks of reactor maintenance at the Fukushima Daiichi complex. Now, many of them are being called to volunteer to work, at standard pay, at the troubled plant.

Mr. Tada's normal job includes painting corroded spots on reactor equipment. On Monday, he is scheduled to join several hundred other workers who will be on call for duty at the compound. Some are engineers and operations specialists. Others will drag electrical cables, hook up water pipes or otherwise provide on-the-ground muscle in the effort to bring the overheating reactors under control.

Accounts of the work performed at the site are largely second-hand. Workers, some of whom stay at a soccer facility on the edge of the evacuation zone that surrounds the plant, have little contact with outsiders. Phone communications are spotty.

Radiation Levels in Japan

The Japanese government monitors radiation levels around the country. Track these measurements over time.

The Battle for Fukushima Daiichi

Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency/Reuters

Mr. Tada, a soft-spoken man with a pleasant round face and black glasses,says in an interview that colleagues at the complex who have phoned him said they have been positioning pumps needed to bring water to the site. They have told him radiation levels aren't so bad, he says.

Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co.95013.03%, or Tepco, and other companies that are sending employees to the Fukushima Daiichi plant say they aren't paying the workers extra or providing benefits beyond existing accident and sickness insurance. The companies say they have been too busy dealing with the emergency to consider such things. Workers haven't raised the issue either, they say, in a country where pushing for more cash in such a time of crisis is seen as crass.

"There isn't a single person who's been doing this because of money,'' says Tadashi Ikeda, senior managing director of Tokai Toso. Plenty of workers are locals who have been forced out of their homes by the radiation levels and are eager to help get things back to normal, he adds.

Mr. Tada says he typically earns about ¥200,000 ($2,470) a month, well below Japan's average monthly salary of ¥291,000. "It can't be helped," he says, adding his mother doesn't want him to go. "Someone has to do it."

Like Mr. Tada, who studied construction in technical school, many of the workers are lightly educated. Their key skill is a familiarity with radioactive environments—a plus when working in areas where radiation levels topped 2,000 microsieverts an hour for much of Monday, around 30,000 times normal levels before the accident. Levels Thursday morning had fallen to slightly above 200 microsieverts an hour.

Some 60 essential staff live on the reactor site in a heavily shielded building, leading to early impressions that the fate of the reactor-cooling effort hung in the hands of a crew somewhat misleadingly dubbed the Fukushima 50. Those core managers, led by the director of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, guide the recovery effort, operate the control room and keep an eye on reactor readings. They rarely leave the building.

The rest, from firefighters to electric-line layers, are pulled out when their shifts are done, to stay where radiation levels are lower. The soccer facility that is one staging ground for forays to the complex, J-Village, is so close to the 12-mile border of the government's evacuation zone that Fukushima prefecture says it is within the zone. The Defense Ministry says it isn't.

On Wednesday, Tepco dispatched 330 of its workers to the plant grounds. Another 224 workers were sent in from what Tepco calls "cooperating companies,'' such as Tokai Toso.

Mr. Tada is in a group of semiskilled workers who hover somewhere in the middle of Japan's nuclear power-plant ecosystem. At the bottom are laborers, often paid by the day. At the top are managers and engineers from plant operator Tepco and companies like Toshiba Corp.TOSYY3.36% and Hitachi Ltd., which maintain the reactors.

The Hitachi group has sent 120 people to the plant at Tepco's request, many from subsidiary Hitachi Plant Technologies Ltd. The Toshiba group is supplying 100 people. Tokai Toso, which works for Tepco subsidiary Toden Kogyo Co., has contributed six workers so far, on a voluntary basis, says Mr. Ikeda. "Tepco has been good to us for 40 years," the senior managing director said. "We want to do what we can."

ENLARGE

A handout photo from Tokyo Electric Power shows a worker attempting to repair power lines at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Tomioka, Fukushima Prefecture northeastern Japan on March 18.
Reuters/Tokyo Electric Power Co. via Kyodo/Handout

Radiation managers at Tepco take readings at the places where they want to send each day's workers. Shifting winds and leaks from unstable reactors have meant radiation levels in the complex have veered wildly in the space of hours, and hot spots move from one area to another.

Workers wear protective gear and a mask and must have had training in dealing with radioactive environments. Each person also wears two badges, in chest pockets under gear, to track radiation exposure on each visit. Each worker is limited to a total of 250,000 microsieverts for the duration of the crisis, a limit that was lifted last week from 100,000 microsieverts—the borderline for what is considered "low-dose" exposure.

Mr. Tada says colleagues already at the site have told him they were exposed to around 100 microsieverts of radiation after five hours of work, an amount equivalent to one chest X-ray. That is less than the 190 microsieverts Mr. Tada says he logged in four hours of work one recent day, before the crisis.

Not everyone is so sanguine. At the Saitama Super Arena, a stadium north of Tokyo that has been converted into a refugee shelter for people forced from towns near the Fukushima plant, Mitsuyoshi Oigawa says his son was among those asked to return.

Mr. Oigawa says the call came six days after the quake struck and that his son will likely work at the plant for two or three days. Mr. Oigawa says he has tried without success to call his son's cellphone since then. He worries that radiation exposure could sicken his son.

"There's no way to express what I'd do for him," says Mr. Oigawa, 70. "I'd go in his place if I could."

In an evacuee camp in the city of Tamura, about 20 miles west of the Fukushima Daiichi complex, another worker for a nuclear-equipment maker says he got his call to report for duty earlier this week. The man says he thinks he will be carrying and laying pipes that will bring water to reactor No. 3.

The high-school graduate, whose salary is similar to Mr. Tada's, says he was told he could refuse the call. But he says he felt duty-bound to accept, musing that he would be in the position of sacrificing himself for the good of others, as he says Japanese pilots did in World War II suicide missions. "If the call comes, there's only one thing I can say: 'Yes, I'll go.' I thought of the kamikaze—sacrificing yourself for someone else," he says. "My heart is calm."

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